


Lovers In The Dark:  Psyche and Eros

by YesBothWays



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: AU, F/F, Femslash, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-20
Updated: 2016-04-20
Packaged: 2018-06-03 09:15:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6605224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YesBothWays/pseuds/YesBothWays
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Delphine and Cosima as Psyche and Eros.  I always liked how darkness operated in this myth.  This queer version became a story about moving beyond the borders of the known in love, the self, and the ritual of our familiar stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lovers In The Dark:  Psyche and Eros

_“In the tale known as ‘Cupid and Psyche,’ Psyche is a wanderer whose odyssey begins when she is brought to her own funeral pyre in the mountains and abandoned there. In this tale that has all the hallmarks of what would become the classic fairy tales of female seekers, she awakens alone in a palace. There an unknown, unseen lover visits her only at night.”   - Rebecca Solnit "The Faraway Nearby"_

            Why would they take my own clothes away only to give me a set of garments of such fine make? Perhaps they would make me into someone else. Perhaps I am merely a part in a ritual. Any woman who deviated from a known path might suffice. They might tear at the fabric of order by taking a woman walking a well-worn road and moving only in the space between her duties and her kin. I followed stony paths into the mountains. I witnessed the sunset over my own village tiny amidst dozens of others, bedded beneath the open sky, wrapped in the vast cosmos as my only blanket, only to watch the sun rise again. I thought on that first, new day and everyday after, the world did not end for me as they had said it would.

            Only the casualness, the calm with which these strangers apprehended me, bound me, and led me to this place filled me with any sense of regret. I wanted to die a hero, however frail or tragic, not as a duty to be fulfilled, an afterthought, a bright point of inconvenience set into the dull fixture of a common day. And now, as they led me on narrow, well-worn paths in the mountains with my feet tripping on the long ends of garments that were never made for me, I found that my voice failed me entirely. I neither protested my fate nor did I tell my own story to the birds, the stones, or any unseen gods who might be listening.

            A ritual holds a sense of rightness, of inevitability that resonates, that carries a weight of authority that cannot, or at least should not, be questioned. I already knew that I was walking to my own death before we reached the open ledge. My chest seemed to close itself tight to hold onto my true self, locked away from all of them, even as my eyes opened wide to take in the sight before me. Against my own will, I studied the vision before me, the intricately built funeral pyre that I knew was meant for me – for anyone who might have been or could be me – that stood surrounded by brightly burning torches. Even if by some miracle I lived, I knew this sight would never leave me.

 

            I awaken then in total blackness. Instead of feeling afraid, I feel nothing at all. It’s as if my entire being coalesces into that one sense of sight. Driven by instinct, I attempt to pierce through that fabric of darkness, weightless and yet infinitely heavy, by bringing the entirety of my will into a point of concentrated focus as sharp as a needle. There is an unmarked sensation felt always in waking life created by the eyes adjusting: to light, to distance, to various points of focus. Only the absence of this sensation makes me aware of its existence now in this place. Without it, I feel thrown almost as if I have been dizzied, as if I have stepped onto a ship’s deck and have an entirely new world to navigate in my scope of awareness.

            My eyes relax, and it is as if the rest of my body is painted into my consciousness, revealed to my own sense of reality despite being unseen. I am sitting up in a bed, propped up on my hands. The room feels warm, and the bedding feels only slightly warmer where my body has been lying here, for how long, I cannot begin to guess. I cannot decipher if I feel the same or whether I feel changed. I do not feel hunger or thirst. I do not feel any pain. I feel rested. Perhaps I have come to some cosmic place outside of time.

            This present moment attempts to find a meaning and take up a place in some story in my mind. I remember the funeral pyre and bright torches burning. The image seems vivid beyond comprehension; the brightness of sunlight and flames that seemed so eager to consume me, to lick my body into fragments of ash and wisps of smoke. The memory nearly makes me shudder. And I find myself decidedly unafraid of this darkness. There is the possibility life in this place, unthreatened. I will not find fear until I find a reason to be afraid. The unknown is not so terrible to me now.  

            I rise from the bed and feel the heavy, soft fabric of unseen sheets slip away from me as I do. Smooth stones are beneath my feet, and they are warm. The warmth seems to radiate from the stones in this place. The realization that I am naked makes my heartbeat want to quicken. Perhaps I should take a sheet and wrap myself up in it. My mind moves over this, trying to find new paths in such a strange landscape. But the makeshift garment would only be a protection against the sight of someone else, a shield against the risk of being seen. There is no real reason to hide when I am already hidden away. I am faced with my own vulnerability as a mere fact of my existence, simple and beyond any commonplace interventions.

            The bed a few steps behind me, I stop. I know where it is still sits nearby, but I feel unmoored. I stand for a long time in complete uncertainty. Should I venture out to find someone else? Will someone come to find me? My thoughts take up a rivalry among themselves. And finally I think to wonder whether I am even alone in this very place. A hundred stories rise up in my mind. I try to grasp at some tether of meaning. Why have I come to this place? Or else _been brought_ to this place? I cannot imagine any story in which I have come here for purposes of my own. If I am intended for someone else’s use, do I still have any hope of escape? All seems new in this place. Or else, all is absent in this place. This thought fills me with dread, and I push the feeling away. I am here. There was also a place of rest for me here. So, I imagine, there must be something else.

            I feel a hand that touches me, falling across the place where my shoulder and collarbone meet. At once, I decipher that this is not the moment when I meet one of my own deepest fears, here in a place where I no longer know how to run, hide, or otherwise fight to protect my fragile and yet well-kept self, which I have been carefully safeguarding and running away to preserve all of my life. The touch comes against my skin gently and does not press hard or drag me forward. The feel of it brings no threat or entitlement of ownership. I cannot be seen here at all, and yet I find myself knowing that I am being perceived not merely as a thing to be had.   Instead, the touch on my body is searching, shifting with the softest movement to amplify the feel of me, a touch that speaks of a longing to know that is also cautious not to tread forward uninvited. This is undoubtedly the touch of someone who fears to cause me any form of harm. The tenderness of a true self becomes revealed in this place, and the one touching me knows this and shares in this same experience.

            So I have found someone. Or they have found me. There seems to be no distinction between these. I stand breathing almost carefully in the dark, suddenly self-conscious of knowing what to do myself. I wonder who is with me. The darkness seems to shift around me as my mind becomes conscious of a form that must be standing so near to my own. We are standing close enough to touch, and in this strange place, I am aware that I know nothing of the person before me. Sight and every other form of knowing would have deceived me. Now, I am trapped within the confines of the truth, as I never have been before. The hand on my chest shifts in a way I can feel indicates that we are standing even closer.

            In a jumble of thoughts, I realized that I am waiting to be embraced, my heart is beating hard, and the hand on my body can feel my heart beat and my breath moving, as the figure in the dark waits. I cannot decipher whether I anticipating an embrace or desiring one. My uncertainty feels like fever that flares and dies down quickly. That brief moment somehow makes be both aware of my body and distant from it at once. The longing inside of me feels simple then, and before I even decide what I will do in my conscious thoughts, I feel my hands touching the bare sides of another body. I feel the person shiver and then step forward.

            Our bodies are pressing to one another’s. I let my hands come up over skin that feels impossibly soft. My hands come to trace the delicate lines of two shoulder blades, and I can feel that they are strong enough that they might have supported wings. At the same time, the figure moves to return my embrace far more tenderly than I would have imagined. Both hands come to my face and guide me to bring our cheeks to touch just barely.

            My hands come to hold the person by the shoulders gently. My lips touch my own hand then, still held closed, move along the line of a shoulder. I feel the response, a head grown heavy, a face pressing into my other hand, a neck allowed to become even more exposed. For the first time, our touch becomes disrupted by own thoughts and I pause. I imagine myself as a man standing in the darkness seducing a woman I want for a lover. This story is not one that I have read before, and I do not know which side I am on or which part to play. I no longer know how to follow any role or even how to rebel against one.

            So with a pulse beating beneath my lips, I pause. Only a moment of stillness follow that feels a long and difficult one to survive. Then the hands turn my face to allow our lips to meet. I am filled with astonishment. In the past, I have always found that the kisses of men feel slightly smothering. I can tolerate only so many before I must move my face away to breath. When our lips touch, my mouth opens and somehow I find myself filling as with an inpouring of air. It seems easy to breath, impossible not to become filled to the brim and spilling over still, as if life wants to rush into me with more eagerness than I have ever known before.

            After only that one point of contact between us, we become lovers. I know it, and I know that I am not alone in this knowing. I do not know what my hands will find when they move over the body against my own. Nothing could feel less significant to me. As long as I am still met with desire that will entwine with my own, I will become a lover. I will become unlike anything I have been before. We go to bed, and I find myself astonished in a seemingly endless discovery. I have never truly had a lover before. I did not know it until this, and the knowledge unfolds inside me, alters my inner landscape, and transforms every definition of what I have long known as genuine love.

            Afterwards, I leave my lover in bed. I hold one end of the sheet in my hand, held fast at the other end, and feel my way through the room. I am not afraid of anything except losing my way back to the bed. There are walls. The room has borders, definition, a shape, boundaries. Those boundaries might be transgressed. Eventually, I find what feels like a mantle. My fingers know precisely what to do with the feel of a wood box filled with matches, and I tuck the end of the sheet beneath my elbow. By the light of a single matchstick, I find a candle. I light it and carry it with me back to the bed.

            I learned by feel of that my lover had the body of a woman. That she looks more beautiful than I would ever have imagined her in the light feels a weightless thought. The light dancing in her eyes holds far more gravity, and I am drawn close that we might touch and kiss once more. I look over her body, and she pushes the sheets away to allow me to see and touches along the lines of my body as she find me revealed for the first time.

            Upon my lover’s throat is a white mark. I had felt no scar under my hands or lips, and I look closely to see whether I can see what I imagine to be an ink mark was made. It is as if the skin has been washed of life, a pale and lifeless emblem left instead. I can tell from watching her searching hands and eyes that I have a mark like this on my throat, as well. I look over the bed with sheets black as the night sky reflected on water and made empty of stars and wonder how many such marks we might have born and already shed as we coaxed life back into one another’s bodies. Perhaps we were dead or somehow peppered with death like holes in a sickly leaf that finds itself able to keep on living.

            None of that matters now. We are no longer dead if we once were. And I have faith that this one place, touched as if by death, will come to life again. I will hear my lover’s voice; I will learn to speak her name. And yet I will always remember how frail of a vessel a name makes when expected to carry such as vast and intricate being as what I have both felt and known of her in this place. I knew her before words could come between us and fool me into the certainty that little I had learned could ever be all there is to know.

           The candlelight reveals to us a collection of armaments and artifacts hung high upon the walls. Each one speaks to me: sword, shield, and key. Each one calls to use to rise. Locked doors cannot be allowed to remain fast shut forever. Unknown enemies and alliances must be sought. Before we rise, however, I intend to take my lover into my arms once more. The light may be precious; still we both tarry and remain in bed. We mean to know one another first in the newly found light. And we do not fear darkness as we would have before.


End file.
